So… this was a turn of events Emilia definitely hadn’t been expecting. It was so unexpected that all she could do currently was stand there, in the middle of the museum they had been touring, looking around in bafflement, as though by looking harder, Olivier might suddenly pop back into existence.
Unsurprisingly—annoyingly, worryingly—he did not.
Fuck.
Around her, a few students had begun to notice their teacher—not to mention chaperone—was gone, mummers beginning to rise over the words of their tour guide as they began to panic—or, as
some
of them began to panic.
Emilia might be one of those panicking, just a tiny bit, because what the fuck!? Out of all the things she had been expecting—for the trip to go off without incident, for their group to end up sequestered in the Baalphorian Embassy or Wander Fulbrun’s house when something did happen, for
her
to end up vanishing because she caught a scent and had to investigate—Olivier disappearing hadn’t even crossed her mind!
If this had happened in Seer’ik’tine, she would have assumed the man just gotten turned around, or that some criminal organization had gotten a hold of him, planning to use him as leverage to make his family do this or that. If they had been in Dion, she might have assumed one of her enemies grabbed him, intending to use him against her. If this had been another day in Lüshan, her first thought would be that a remnant of the sex-trafficking group she’d helped take down had grabbed him; there were still a few members out there, although based on intel from both The Black Knot and the Drinarna, most had moved on to different organizations. Holding a grudge was currency for organizations themselves, and while the occasional former-member would hold on to a grudge after an organization collapsed, Emilia had always found that rather uncommon, largely because most organizations didn’t want to be pulled into their members’ past drama.
Should she be concerned that she had a working knowledge of how criminals’ minds worked and that it wasn’t all related to training she had received at the hands of The Black Knot or the Blood Rain General? Possibly! But at the moment, she had far more important things to worry about! Namely, where the fuck Olivier had gotten off to and how she could find him—
As though her Censor could sense her distress—which it definitely could—Olivier’s vitals enlarged over her vision, and—
And his vitals cut off.
Fuck. Why would it go blank? There was no way he was dead, right? No—no, Emilia refused to believe that. He was just knocked out with some core ability—plenty of those could interfere with Censors, if the user was powerful enough. There was even some tech that could disable Censors, like the stuff they used to stop Censor usage in the Dread Coliseum—not that she knew of anything like that existing in Lüshan, but criminals could have brought some in! Plus, there was that Censor interference drug, and—
And it didn’t matter. Her stalking function had recorded everything about Olivier up until the moment his Censor went dark, and she was already moving, following the path he had disappeared down while… while being oddly calm. What the fuck? Had the man been calm as he was kidnapped? Or had he just wandered off of his own volition, and… what? Happened across some incident that had ended in him being kidnapped!? Or maybe he had been lured away and—
“Fuck!” Emilia yelped as she was tugged to a stop by the stupid energy handcuff that locked her to Cameron. “Cameron!” she hissed, turning to glare at the Drinarna officer. “Let me go. I have to find Olivier!”
Virtually all of the students had noticed their teacher was gone now. A handful were definitely panicking—fair; the person meant to keep them safe during the trip had vanished, after all—while a few students—including Norrayn—had taken up a role of trying to keep everyone calm and organized. About half of the students were still relatively calm, while a few more were just sort of… wandering off. Great, runaways. Also, not her problem.
“You have to stay with the group,” Cameron said, hard and cold and seemingly unconcerned with their missing non-dev.
“One could argue,” Emilia hissed, tugging at the energy handcuff and finding it annoyingly sturdy, “that Olivier himself is
the group.
Therefore, with him gone, I am not actually with
the group.
Let me go find it.” She tugged on her wrist. Cameron didn’t move—didn’t even fucking blink. “Cameron,” she growled. If she had to force the woman to let her go, she would. The bitch was wasting her precious time in catching Olivier’s trail as it was, and no, actually, she wasn’t playing nice with his life potentially on the line.
He could be bleeding out.
He could be kidnapped, needing someone to rescue him.
Fuck Cameron. Fuck the rest of the class—especially fuck the students leaving, intent to use their teacher’s absence as an excuse to explore the city alone. Those assholes didn’t even seem worried that Olivier was gone, and if they ran into trouble, they deserved to suffer the consequences.
“Let me go,” Emilia warned, one final time.
“No.” The word was barely out of Cameron’s mouth before a burst of pure energy was exploding out of Emilia, her Censor vehemently chastising her for using her core. It could go fuck itself.
It wasn’t often that Emilia was allowed the opportunity to use her core, although she could in a pinch. Due to Censors
hating
core use, doing so in more than brute force blasts meant to either defend or attack on the most basic of levels wasn’t something she—or any other person with a permanent Censor—could do. It also wasn’t something many people realized a few of them
could
do. Even Emilia had no idea how many Baalphorians could brute force their core in emergencies. It wasn’t a big group, even most of her friends balking at the idea of training their core to do anything other than exist inside them. A few had learned. All of them hoped to never need to use their core—to use it meant they were in dire straits or something was terribly wrong.
Olivier gone—his Censor offaether—was definitely wrong.
Cameron, fortunately, was among those who had no idea she could use her core. That moment of shock was enough for Emilia to turn, a skill she had rarely used in front of other people exploding out of her and leaving her a trail of movement over the museum’s floor as she moved, following the lines of the aethernet along the path Olivier had disappeared.
Microsparking—as she and Halen had dubbed it several years previous—had been designed by her and perfected with Halen’s help after she had revealed it to him in the aftermath of their destruction of Coral’s former school. With everything they had done to that school, it was clear to virtually everyone they had been the ones to destroy it. Given the amount of damage they had caused, however, they had wanted an alibi, lest they find their parents on the hook for the cost of repairs. How does one get an alibi, when their signature is clear across the skills used to destroy a school? They get as far away as possible.
Therein came microsparking, which Emilia had been experimenting with on and off for a few months. It was faster than sliding or bubbles, and for a low-dev who could use the skill sequentially with few breaks, it had the potential to be even faster than slide lines. The world also wasn’t ready for it. The fact that she and Halen had been able to use a broken, glitchy version to get far enough away from the school for it to be inconceivable that they could be involved in the vandalism when they were being arrested for public intoxication and indecency only an hour later, in a city that should have taken three hours to travel to, was proof enough of that.
Everyone knew they destroyed the school. No one could prove it, and even the government—who had definitely considered charging them, despite learning how terrible the school’s students and teachers had been to Coral—had decided against filing charges. If they ended up in court, so would microsparking. It wouldn’t matter if they never publicly released the skill; the nation would know such fast travel was possible, and everyone knew that out of all the things criminals wouldn’t ask their own hackers to create, lest they break the world
too much
, a skill that would allow its members to elude law enforcement wasn’t one of them. From there, the skill would have to be publicly released despite the fact that Baalphoria’s law enforcement, its laws and security systems, weren’t ready to deal with microsparking. After all, there was no way the government could tell citizens that criminals could have access to a similar skill, which would allow them to sneak up on victims to steal or kill or maim, while the public wasn’t allowed access to a skill that would allow them to escape.
So, despite the skill now being perfect—largely thanks to Halen’s finickiness and her actually having someone capable to help test the skill—neither of them used in much outside The Penns. Their friends had it, of course—although, as Emilia rushed along, thinking of the potential ramifications of microsparking’s existence becoming public, she didn’t think many of Halen’s friends had actually been given it—as did The Black Knot. Where anyone could see, it was for emergencies only. People could definitely see her now, slipping along the lines of the aethernet so quickly it appeared she was vanishing and reappearing in ten to twenty metre intervals—actually, it was mostly less than that, one of the few limitations of microsparking being visual confirmation that no one was standing where you wanted to land, that there was nothing in your way.
Emilia would rather microspark and run in combination than risk an injury when she toppled over something or ended up with a random museum exhibit embedded in her—that was the other main downfall: the risk of accidentally impaling yourself on something when you attempted to occupy the same space as it. Smaller microsparks it was. Bolting around corners and pushing people out of her way as well. They’d live; Olivier might not.
Fuck, though. How had the man managed to get so far so quickly? One moment, they had been chatting, the next, he was fucking gone. What had she even been doing? Wandering off to look at an exhibit, right? It all seemed so… blurry—unclear in a way that was just
wrong.
Unfortunately, Emilia knew she couldn’t trust herself on this. The problem was, her imagination had always been a little too strong—so powerful it could even take her by surprise. It was those sparks of inspiration that she loved—that made her the hacker she was, allowing her to bend the universe in ways that no one save Halen could even comprehend half the time, not even Vrin. It also made her susceptible to letting her imagination get away from her, and with all of her and Olivier’s talk about the will of the aether the night before…
Part of her wanted to say that she had been pulled away by the aether—that it had tugged her attention to something that shouldn’t have been able to capture her so fully that Olivier, whose presence was practically palpable to her soul when they were together, had been able to slip away. Part of her wanted to say Olivier had vanished for similar reasons—what other reason would he have for leaving his students alone? For not even messaging her to say he was going off to do… something?
A bigger part of her knew that believing in the will of the aether was insane. As much as so much about the aether was unknown, Emilia just couldn’t believe there was something actually sentient about it. Maybe she could be convinced that energy from various people touched the aether, and that energy could reach other people, if the intentions were strong enough—could be convinced that was how she had known to go to Lux the night ‘ariah had come to kill her. Maybe she could be convinced that the energy of things shifted when something was wrong with them—could be convinced that was how she knew not to eat certain things lest she poison herself.
As someone who spent so much of her life thinking about how to manipulate the aether, another good chunk spent testing the things she created, why shouldn’t she be capable of feeling odd shifts in its energy? As much as she had teased Olivier the night before—and it was nice that she could remember every detail of their conversations, even if she could never speak of it to anyone, only message him about what she’d learned—for not imagining himself as the hero destined to be born into his family, if his family’s myth about leaving the Grey Sands was to be believed, Emilia didn’t think herself a hero either.
If the aether were to speak to someone—guide their way—surely it would push its hero along the proper path. There was no way it would choose someone like her—someone left staring, dead eyed, at the last location Olivier’s Censor had recorded before it went dark.
At the very least, she hadn’t rounded that final corner and found Olivier’s corpse. Neither, however, did she find any sign of him or whoever had taken him.
Some hero she would make.
.
!
Arc 9 | Chapter 373: The World Ain’t Ready (but too bad, its an emergency)
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